"Out
of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land"
(Jer 1:14) is a verse every Israeli pupil learns by heart. This biblical
truth has never been more true than these days: the Syrian President, in a
major threat to the Jewish state, offers Israel to resume peace talks. A
blatant crime against
war itself.
Israel, understandably, is forced to defend itself.

There
are several convincing reasons why Israel should reject the peaceful Syrian
hand. First of all, Syria should come to the negotiation table without any
preconditions. When Assad proved evil enough to accept this, Israel demanded
that Syria stop it alleged support for "terrorism" (and accept the
Israeli-American definition of terrorism, to include resistance to
occupation). Fair enough: both sides, except the Israeli side, should come
to the negotiation table without any preconditions. Imagine Syria demanding
that Israel end its occupation, or just dismantle its death squads, as a
precondition to resume peace talks.

Then
we are told that president Assad is young and inexperienced. A problem
indeed. A good solution would be to reject his offer for a few more decades
of hostility, when all our "experts for Arab issues" will be able to claim
safely that he is too old to change, and/or that his days are counted. Then
we can wait for his successor, hopefully a young and inexperienced one.

A
clear evidence for Assad "inexperience" are his manners. The Syrian
president chose to convey his peaceful message to Israel in public. "There
are covert diplomatic channels for such a message," official Israel says
triumphantly. Indeed, how irresponsible of Assad. If he had conveyed his
message confidentially, Israel could (1) again dismiss it as unserious,
because only an open message preparing the Syrian public for the policy
change would have proved Assad's real commitment; and/or (2) Leak the secret
talks in order to stop them, just like it did recently with Libya. In fact,
as even senior mainstream analyst
Ze'ev Schiff
observes, Israeli leaks are far from haphazard: "In most cases a leak
relates to the start of contacts with some Arabs, and after the leak, the
contacts are usually broken. There is scarcely any doubt that the leak is
aimed at thwarting the contacts and even smearing those Israelis trying to
nurture connections with the Arab side.[…] In many cases, this has
succeeded. The Arab side is put off." (Ha'aretz, 16.1.04)

A
further argument is that Assad is just yielding to the American pressure,
and wants to promote Syria's interests by improving his relations with the
US. A head-of-state actively pursuing his country's interests is indeed an
outrageous idea. And as for yielding to pressure, it reminds me of the
Israeli army initiation rite, when a group of old soldiers gives a newcomer
a live hand-grenade, all yelling at him: "throw it away, or it explodes in
your hand!" Once the young soldier hurls the bomb, he is mocked at: "You
chicken, yielding to social pressure..."

A
major, persistent claim is that Israel cannot run peace talks on two fronts
at the same time. Very understandable: Israel's military strategy has always
been based on the assumption that it should be able to cope with war on all
fronts at once: to face a simultaneous attack on both the Egyptian and the
so-called Eastern front (i.e. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all
joining forces together; an imminent scenario!). But holding peace talks on
two fronts at once? That's truly impossible. Just think of two negotiation
teams, with their regular flights, fax and phone bills. A small state like
Israel can simply not afford it. Even a self-hating Jew
like myself understands that it is impossible to launch peace talks on a
second front. But I wonder: what is actually the first front? Surely not
peace talks with the Palestinians, that exploded more than three years ago
and have never been resumed?

And
then the ultimate excuse: the US is not interested in Israeli peace talks
with Syria. Indeed, unlike Assad who is trying to promote his country's
interests, Israel's government came to power to pursue American, not Israeli
policy goals. But granting that, the US has been quite reluctant towards
several aspects of Israel's policy: the illegal settlements are repeatedly
condemned as "obstacle to peace", and the Apartheid Wall has not been all
too welcome in Washington either. Why is Israel ready to defy its sponsor to
save the occupation, but happily embraces the American position when peace
talks are threatening? Obviously, if the American administration had urged
Israel to move towards peace, Israel could claim it "would not yield to
pressure". Rejectionism is clearly a win-win policy (and to hell with the
victims of war).

The Press

Since
Likud is in power, not all Israeli columnists are blind to all that. Several
of them write more or less openly that Syria has no partner for peace
because of Sharon's rejectionism. But many of them would immediately support
Sharon if he goes for Labour's favourite option, i.e. endless negotiations
that lead nowhere and just serve to win time; they therefore avoid
mentioning the obvious price of peace with Syria. After all, "peace talks"
is a good sound bite for foreign investments. As I have written before,
Israel occupied the Golan in 1967 not because of Syrian aggression but for
common greed for the Heights' fertile land, and since no state succeeded in
moving an international border by force in the post-WW2 era, there is no
reason for Syria to give up its claim to get back all its territory. One can
almost admire Sharon's honesty when he reminds that peace with Syria means
giving the entire Golan back. Right-wing columnists like Yisrael Harel (Ha'aretz,
15.1) – too naďve for the option of negotiations not as a way to peace, but
as a bypass road around it – suggests that Israel exploit Syria's despair to
make it "compromise with reality" and give up its claims; a Syrian
territorial concession to Turkey has thus been over emphasized in the
Israeli press.

The Military

But
who cares about press or politicians, or even about Israel's president's
invitation to Assad to "visit Jerusalem" – too little, too late, and too
transparent to convince anybody. After all, it's the Army that runs the
country, and it has its less subtle ways to convey messages. Though offices
of some Palestinian resistance groups have been based in Damascus for
decades, only in the past months did Israel start threatening Syria after
every successful Palestinian attack. The first non-diplomatic hint was
launched last August (Ha'aretz, 17.8.03), when Israeli air force
planes breached Syrian sovereignty and flew over Assad's summer palace in
northern Syria.

Israel's military response to the present Syrian peace threat has been clear
enough: Brig.-Gen. Eval Giladi, head of planning in the IDF's Planning
Branch, said that Israel could occupy Damascus as quickly as the Americans
had taken Baghdad (Ha'aretz, 31.12.03), and that Israel should think
of a war with Syria in terms of "regime change" (Israeli TV news, the same
day). Not a lot of diplomatic niceties on this end.

Along
with a $60m plan to build homes for thousands of new settlers on the
occupied Golan Heights, indented to increase the population by 50% over
three years and
unveiled at
just the right time, Syria seems to have gotten the message: Assad, we are
now told, "does not believe a peace agreement with the present Israeli
government can be reached" (Ha'aretz, 18.1). I wonder why.

Ran HaCohen
teaches in the Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative Literature,
and is currently working on his PhD thesis. He also works as a literary
translator (from German, English and Dutch), and as a literary critic for
the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth. HaCohen’s semi-regular
“Letter from Israel” column can be found atAntiWar.com,
where this article first appeared. Posted with author’s permission.